News and views about the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 and other legislation, schemes and policies impacting the Right to Education of India's Children.

A month ago I wrote about the problems that teachers are
having in using continuous comprehensive evaluation (CCE). A friend who
read it wrote back to me with a simple question.

Her question was that if it is so difficult to implement
CCE, why does the Right to Education Act, 2009, mandate it for all the
schools across the country? In general, isn’t it better to try and
implement something that is practical, rather than aim for the ideal
which is clearly unworkable in the current conditions?

A recap on CCE: it is a method of assessment of a child’s
learning on an ongoing basis and it is used in the class to teach the
child better. CCE replaces tests up to the eighth grade; it doesn’t give
any scores or marks. Such an assessment method serves many goals. For
example, it helps in improving learning rather than judging children, it
focuses on multiple capacities of the child and not on testing rote,
and it’s non-threatening and so, socio-psychologically better for the
child.

There are many hurdles to CCE actually getting
implemented. Some of these are: teachers have to handle 30-40 kids
together across multiple grades together, leaving no time for the
subtleties of CCE, teachers lack the capacities required to use
something like this effectively, the pedagogical approach in reality in
most schools remains rooted to rote, etc.

So then, why try for something like CCE? Why not settle
for something more practical? Especially when the implementation has to
be across the massive Indian schooling system, which has about 1.5
million schools and over 200 million students.

In my view, we must decide education (including its
components) as it ought to be. We should derive goals for our education
system from this ought to be, let’s call these the ideal goals. On the
other hand, what I am calling practical, are goals that are incremental,
seemingly achievable improvements within the current constraints of the
average school. I will list three reasons why our goals have to be the
ideal, and not the practical. The comments that follow are general and
use CCE only as an illustration. Examples of other such issues could be:
the curriculum of schools, the design of our teacher education system,
the culture of school management, etc.

Today, our system does a shoddy job of what actually
needs to be practical. To be successful, the planning and its execution
to get to any goal must be practical, that is, must take in to account
realities on the ground, develop relevant strategies, execute with
rigour, and not compromise on the goals even if the progress is
incremental. Our education system (with few notable exceptions) doesn’t
do all this. It takes any goal, converts it in to some procedures and
documents and considers its task done. It has an extraordinary ability
to take out the spirit of everything, and convert it in to a mechanical
tick-the-box approach.

To go back to the CCE example, most states seem to
believe that it will get done magically across the thousands of schools,
with some minor training of teachers, and some checklists to be filled.
The goals must be ideal, but the execution plan must be practical. No
great insight in this, but mostly we don’t get it.

Aiming for the ideal goals on even one aspect of
education (for example, assessment) presents an opportunity to improve
other aspects. This is because of the integrated nature of education.
Assessment, teacher capacity, teacher education, pedagogy, curriculum,
school and system management, culture, etc., are all so intricately and
organically linked that efforts to change one dimension necessarily
means changes on other dimensions. For real improvement, all must move
with some synchronicity, while perfect coordination may be impossible. A
practical goal by definition arises from an acceptance of current state
of affairs taking them as constraints, whereas an ideal goal is a
potential lever to change all aspects of the system.

Articulating practical goals for a system only deepens
inequity in an already iniquitous structure. This happens because in
reality the practical becomes a goal for the disadvantaged; whereas the
privileged strive for the ideal as their goal, pushed by both internal
and external forces. The well-off schools were doing versions of CCE,
long before it was mandated. The deep impact of this divergence of goals
is manifold because the disadvantaged schools that need support and
resources get it with only the practical goals in sight. This has a
determining impact on those who need support most, i.e., the large
majority of our 1.5 million schools.

Such choices have cumulative, historical effects and they
cannot be unwound. So, a society or nation committed to equity and
democracy must decide what education ought to be and then go for it, for
the whole system. It’s then that the burden of making it happen becomes
clearer, and the society has to figure out how to make it happen,
obliged to do whatever is required and provide whatever support is
needed.

Anurag Behar is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation and also
leads sustainability initiatives for Wipro Ltd. He writes every
fortnight on issues of ecology and education. Comments are welcome at
othersphere@livemint.com. To read Anurag Behar’s previous columns, go towww.livemint.com/othersphere-